


Forever

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Canon Era, F/M, Post-Canon, Superpowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-01
Updated: 2017-09-01
Packaged: 2018-12-22 13:15:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11968176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Sometimes these things just happen. Sometimes people die when they should live and sometimes they live when they should die. That's life.





	Forever

**Author's Note:**

> Please note the tags up there. I personally wouldn't consider this especially gory, nothing here is done for shock or to gross you out, but there are some very serious injuries that are described frankly.

She falls. He jumps.

He’s careful. Time is running out—for the both of them, given that they’re hurtling through open air—but that’s precisely why he has to; at these speeds they could kill one another if this isn’t done just right. But Ward manages somehow to pull her into his arms, and then all her relief washes away at the spark of pain in her leg. He cups the back of her head, pulling her close so he can yell directly into her ear. Still, she only barely hears him say, “Fitz said the rat lived!”

She wants to cry. But she’s been crying all day and there are several thousand feet of air beneath her so all she does is cling tighter to a man who very well may have just doomed himself in a futile attempt at saving her.

At least Fitz kept his distance in the lab, never once touching her. But with her legs wrapped around his waist and her face pressed to his shoulder and with the disease’s final course humming in her veins so loud it drowns out the wind whistling by, there is no possible way Ward won’t be infected. And a rat is not a human, there’s no guarantee this will work, and then where will he be? Several miles above the Atlantic Ocean with her floating corpse as proof that his life expectancy has suddenly grown considerably shorter.

“Hold on!” he yells, and she shrieks when the parachute catches them.

He holds her in his arms and says silly things she can only half hear about the view and her terrible skydiving form. She rests her head against his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she breathes just before her vision whites out. The last thing she feels, before the fire racing along her nerve-endings, is his hands tightening around her.

 

Afterward, when they’re waiting for pick-up in Morocco, she’ll fuss for hours until he suggests that the cure vaccinated him. It’s ridiculous and makes no sense at all, but when days pass and he shows no symptoms, she has to concede he might be right.

“It shouldn’t have worked,” she says, frowning over his test results.

“I’m just lucky, I guess,” he says, then heads into the cargo bay for his afternoon workout.

 

 

* * *

 

 

She sits beside a bed in a base whose designation she had never heard before today, holding the limp hand of her best friend in the world. “Fury’s doctors said it was a miracle either of us-” She can’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t even know _how_ because Fitz is going to be fine. He’s going to wake up and be absolutely fine.

Coulson’s hand wraps around her shoulder, a bit of fatherly support that breaks her heart in an entirely new way. She loves Coulson, but right now she wishes her dad were here to tell her it’ll be all right.

“It was,” he says. Then his voice hardens into something on the softer side of stern. “But you are not at fault for making it through. If you hadn’t pulled him to the surface, he wouldn’t be here at all.”

“Or he’d be the one talking to you and I’d be the one in that bed.” She wants to wish she was, it’s the right thing to do, but for the life of her she can’t. That only makes her feel worse.

“Jemma,” he says. He turns her, makes her look at him instead of Fitz’s pale face. “This is not. Your. Fault.”

But she feels like it is.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“It’s a gift,” Skye says. Raina scoffs while Skye sets the obelisk on the edge of the table. “My mom said she knew SHIELD had wanted to study the last one.”

Jemma tries not to look too disturbed by the _gift_. She knows to these people it’s an integral part of their culture and heritage, but to her it will always be one of the objects which killed Trip.

“I’m sure we’ll be able to learn a lot from it,” she says brightly. “Especially now that we know what it’s for.” She’s afraid she’s not sounding quite as eager as she’d like, so she turns to something less horrific—but only slightly. “Raina,” she says, “would you mind-”

The woman removes the scarf covering her head and sits like a queen beside the table. There aren’t many chairs and the height of them is rather awkward for this, so Jemma kneels on the floor with her kit by Raina’s feet. The first hurdle comes sooner than she’d like, as finding a spot to do a blood draw requires some searching. Even with the smaller, softer quills in Raina’s elbow, Jemma gets pricked right through her gloves.

“How-” Jemma purses her lips around her bleeding knuckle, uncertain how to ask what she wants to.

“How do I move?” Raina asks, wearing her silky smile. It’s turned downright terrifying by her transformation. “Eat? Sleep? Shit?”

Skye makes an impolite noise and Lincoln gives Raina a _look_ , but Jemma’s had worse patients—two of whom in this very room, in fact.

“Is it possible it isn’t finished?” she asks. She darts a glance at Lincoln over the edge of the table. He’s taken the only other chair while Skye keeps her distance across the room. It’s kind of adorable.

“It can take longer,” he says, “but Raina’s transition seems stable. She’s already begun to display new abilities.”

Skye makes another noise, and Raina smiles again. “I see the future.” She touches Jemma’s cheek with the soft skin of her fingertips. “Do you want to know yours?”

“No, thank you.” Jemma didn’t believe in clairvoyance a year ago, she certainly doesn’t believe in it now. It’s rather more likely Raina’s pretending for her own twisted ends. “Is this – normal?” she asks, in part to kill time while she considers where best to put a blood pressure cuff. “Transformations that are harmful?”

“It isn’t-” Lincoln starts, but whatever angry sentiment he was about to impart is cut off by the unmistakable sound of a gunshot. He stands—it isn’t his fault though, everyone in the room is startled (save, Jemma will realize later, Raina, who only sits calmly as before)—and in doing so jostles the table.

The obelisk teeters and falls. Jemma, on instinct, reaches out to catch the falling object. She only realizes when the sting of cold metal strikes her palm that she shouldn’t.

She snatches her hand back, allowing the obelisk to drop to the floor. Somehow, in the quiet that follows, it’s even louder than the gunshot was.

“Simmons?” Skye asks, her voice small and frightened.

Heart in her throat and memories of Chitauri metal in her head, Jemma looks at her hand. Nothing. She’s fine.

“Oh my God,” Skye breathes, rushing over to hug her. “You scared the crap out of me!” But she doesn’t seem frightened any longer, if anything she seems happy. “This means you’re one of us! Right?” She looks to Lincoln.

He nods slowly. “I guess it does.” He tears his eyes away from Jemma’s hand to shake himself. “Come on. We have to see what happened. Someone might be hurt.”

Skye squeezes Jemma one more time before rushing for the door. Jemma knows she should go after them—someone _could_ be hurt—but her heart is still pounding; it hasn’t yet received the memo that she’s fine, she’s alive.

She stares at the obelisk and wonders why Skye never mentioned it feeling so disquieting, like her skin was cracking everywhere it touched. But Skye _did_ mention the alien writing. Jemma reaches out, thinking if she could only see that it might be worth the painful sensation.

Raina’s bare foot—dark and covered in quills like all the rest of her—sets down on it before Jemma can touch it again. She drags it back beneath her chair, out of reach. “No,” she says when their eyes meet, “you’re not.”

A chill washes over Jemma—at the statement, at the pity in Raina’s wide eyes, at how close she came to death—but she has no time to examine it.

“Simmons!” That’s May’s voice, loud and just emotional enough that Jemma knows she’s truly frightened.

She runs, leaving Raina and the obelisk behind.

 

 

* * *

 

 

On Maveth she searches days for food or water. She tries not to think about it.

She will.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“I’m not going to help-” Her proud refusal fades into a whimper when he cleans the cut along her ribs, the one that started her screaming. She closes her eyes against the renewed pain but that’s a mistake; she can see the telekinetic’s smiling face. She never would’ve thought it possible, but between the two of them Ward is preferable, so she forces her eyes open and fixes them on him working above her.

“This isn’t about that,” he says, which is absurd. The only alternative she can see is that he’s patching her up out of the goodness of his heart and that’s certainly not possible. “Fitz is telling Malick’s techs everything they want to know right now.”

She whimpers again, this time for an entirely different reason. Ward seems to know as much and keeps working. The pain of being sewed back together is nothing to being torn apart, and much as she wishes they weren’t, his hands are familiar enough to be comforting.

She breathes through this pain the way she couldn’t through the other and tries not to think about Fitz helping to bring It back to Earth. She knows why. He’s doing it for her, not just to spare her the pain but because he promised he’d bring Will home to her. She’s terrified she’ll only end up losing them both.

“It’s a good thing too,” Ward says.

Her eyes snap open, but the telekinetic hasn’t returned. It’s just the two of them. But as it’s been several minutes since either of them spoke, she’s reasonably confused.

“Giyera was really going to town on you,” he says, gesturing to the burns and cuts marring her abdomen. “Some of these…” He blows out a breath and shakes his head. The puff of warm air makes her shiver when it hits her exposed belly; it’s a sharp contrast to the cold ground she’s lying on.

“Is that the best you can do?” she demands, gritting her teeth and turning her attention to the spot of sky visible where the post she was tied to earlier meets the roof of the tent. She watched the stars come out, focusing on them instead of what the telekinetic was doing to her. “The closest you can come to an apology?”

He chuckles. “I’m only saying, you’re lucky to be alive. I’ve seen guys twice your size bleed out from less.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?” She can’t make sense of him at all. First he has her dragged in here and left to be _tortured_ for hours without the least bit of care. Then when he returned and ordered her torturer—because he couldn’t have the bollocks to do the job his own bloody self, oh no—to leave, he actually looked concerned, as if he might _care_ about her. And now he’s laughing at her.

“Just a fact. I mean look at this. You’ve seen enough dead bodies to know-”

“I’ve also seen your handiwork,” she says. “And I know Bobbi suffered far worse than this from you.”

He nods slowly, completely without guilt. “Because I know how to do my job. That guy Malick sent in here? He’s just a dog, likes playing with his food, doesn’t care how bad he tears it up ‘cause in the end he’s just gonna eat it anyway.”

She wishes she were capable of moving solely so that she could turn away from what is surely gearing up to be a mocking speech. She settles for glaring daggers at him.

“I could’ve kept Morse alive for days going like that,” he says like it’s an accomplishment and not base brutality. “But Giyera?” He drops his eyes to her abdomen again. “Anyone gets torn up like that? Wouldn’t even make it to sundown.” He tsks over the thought while he pulls her up into a sitting position, his hands warm against skin that breaks out in goosebumps as pain ripples through her. He drags a chair over and wraps her hands around its arm, makes sure she’s steady before grabbing a roll of gauze to wrap her torso. “Sometimes that kinda shit happens. Like when Skye shot me? Shoulda killed me.”

“Would that it had,” she says, her voice shaking as badly as the rest of her.

“John wanted that,” he says like she didn’t say anything at all. “He wanted to be one of those people who just … survive. No matter what life throws at them.”

Each brush of his knuckles against her skin—and she is _sure_ they are purposeful—leaves her a little warmer. Even the pain is growing more manageable the longer she sits up. She flexes the fingers of one hand and then the other. She doesn’t fall.

“You make it sound like it’s not just luck,” she says. She’s spent enough time around field agents to know that sometimes those sorts of things happen, people survive when they should die and die when they should live. That’s life.

“It’s more than that,” Ward insists, his mouth pulling down while he secures the end of the gauze. “For most people, yeah, but we both know there are people out there who are more than lucky. People who can survive being hit by cars or a couple bullets in the gut or alien infection.”

The chill is back and only grows more pronounced as Ward sits back to meet her eyes. He pulls her hands from the chair and drags her to her feet. It hurts, there’s no doubting that, but his words must have left her more numb than she thought because she manages it with only a brief gasp of pain.

“People who’ll live forever,” he says. Then he zipties her wrists and, without another word, leaves her with a pair of guards stationed just down the hall.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Amazing,” Malick says while she struggles to breathe.

She’s in a room, on a bed. There are TVs affixed to the wall and books littering the floor and Ward is standing over her, shirtless so that she can clearly see Coulson was _not_ lying about crushing his chest.

“I’m sure our scientists would appreciate-”

Ward’s glare cuts Malick off.

“Of course. My apologies.” Malick thinks Ward is the god he spoke of at length while Fitz was on the planet, that much is obvious from the awe in his face and voice. But after the six months she spent there, Jemma would know if the creature that tormented Will was in this room. It isn’t.

“My army?” Ward asks.

Malick nods hurriedly. “Of course. I’ll see to it.” He leaves before Ward can ask for anything else, closing the door behind him.

Jemma lifts a hand to her throat, feeling the clean line of cut flesh. She’s felt similar wounds—Eric Koenig’s was in the same location, but his throat was ruined while hers is cut as cleanly as one of her own incisions on a cadaver.

Ward reaches out, tipping her chin back with his thumb and pressing the skin together. He makes a sound low in his chest like a death rattle. “Guess it’s back to collared shirts for you.”

She slaps his hand away. Truthfully, she’s not angry at him. She’s more angry at herself. She should have given his words the last time they met more consideration, but she allowed herself to be convinced they were the ramblings of a madman. Not that she was necessarily _wrong_ in that regard, but now she has proof that, despite his mental state, Ward was right. Sometimes these things do just happen.

She lets her expression ask her question for her.

He makes her wait while he grabs a length of cloth from a dresser against the far wall. “That’s right,” he says and sets his knee on the bed beside her—completely unnecessarily—while he wraps the scarf tight around her throat, tight enough it would choke her were she anyone else. “I’m Hydra’s god. And I just brought you back from the dead, so you’d better be grateful.”

She rolls her eyes. He can play any part he likes for Malick and whatever surveillance he surely has on this room, but there is no way—voice or no voice—that she’ll be going along with it.

He bends over her, so close his lips brush her ear and she can hear the faint rattle of his every breath in those ruined lungs. “And I’m also gonna let you choose how Giyera dies,” he says softly. Her hand goes to her throat, then sinks down to her stomach, which still pulls uncomfortably no matter how she moves. “So there’s that too.”

He grins at her when he leans back and drapes the scarf’s end carefully over her chest. “There. That looks better.”

She glares. She really, really hates him.

 

By the time she’s rescued—a full three months later—that hatred has dimmed to resigned annoyance. Ward is a prat, but he’s far less fanatical than Malick and the other heads. And he does keep his promises.

Though she has her voice back, she doesn’t tell the others the truth about herself or Hydra’s supposed god. She reasons that if they think Ward is some alien deity, they might stand half a chance of killing him.

 

They don’t.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They’re lined up, six of them. It’s not the old team but May and Hunter are both among the captives as well. Reinforcements will be coming soon but the New Gods—an Inhuman offshoot of the cult they encountered in Norway months before the uprising—are growing antsy. They’re too foolish to be frightened as they ought now that SHIELD’s arrived on their doorstep. They want vengeance for the intrusion. They want blood.

“Has anyone ever told you you look kinda like a squirrel?” Hunter asks and receives a fist to the jaw for it. It would send him straight off the dock if there weren’t an Inhuman behind him to keep him up. He’s trying to distract their captors from the rest of them. He’s going to get himself killed.

The Inhuman, who really does look like a squirrel thanks to that bushy tail, yells obscenities at Hunter, acting as a fantastic distraction while May angles herself to make an attack. But with so many of the enemy, most with powers they haven’t even seen yet, it’s sure to end in disaster.

“I created the vaccine,” Jemma says, her calm voice cutting through the drama. She waits a beat to ensure every eye is on her then says again, “I created the vaccine.”

“The one to destroy us,” another of the Inhumans says. This one looks normal enough, but as he looms over her, she can see the whites of his eyes are a metallic gray.

“To protect people from suffering unwanted transitions, yes.” She’s not ashamed of it. The vaccine rendered from Carl Creel's blood has saved countless people from transitioning against their will.

There are murmurs from the other Inhumans. Hunter is struggling against the squirrelly one. May is looking heartbroken. It brings out the lines on her face and the dock lights overhead highlight the gray in her hair. Everyone is getting older. That’s another reason Jemma has to do this, albeit the most selfish one.

“She’s lying,” Hunter tries. “She’s crazy, always talking nonsense. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

“No,” the Inhuman standing over Jemma says, stepping back. He lifts his hand, aims his first two fingers at her head like the barrel of a gun. “She isn’t.”

Backup will arrive soon. The others will be fine.

“I swear, if you hurt her-” Whatever would follow up May’s threat, Jemma never hears it over the impossible sound of a gunshot.

 

She wakes up underwater and lets the current carry her away from SHIELD and her friends and the life that she loved so much. It’s time to start again.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Well this is a change of pace.”

She twists the forceps, earning a hollow gasp from Ward. Or from Agent John Cole, as he’s calling himself now. Really, he is no less terrible in the twenty-second century than he was in the twenty-first.

She removes the bullet and drops it into the surgical tray beside his head. “What are you talking about?” she demands. Lucky for the both of them most of the agents in this triage center are aliens and speak little to no English; they can speak freely. “I used to patch up your should’ve-been life threatening injuries all the time.”

“On the _Bus_ ,” he says, rolling his shoulders and moving to sit up, completely at ease with the gaping hole in his chest. She throws his shirt over it before anyone can see. “But I’ve been the one patching you up-”

“Twice. More than a century ago.” She snaps off her gloves and tosses them. “It doesn’t count.”

“It so does.”

It does not, but she refuses to be drawn into a childish back-and-forth with him.

He grabs her chin, angles it up. “Scar’s gone.”

She hums low in her—unscarred—throat. It healed quickly, before she even faked her death for the first time. Those on her abdomen followed before World War Three had ended. The last to go was the scar from her attempt to escape Will, it left a divot in her leg for decades and she still swears she can see it when the light’s just right.

She takes his hand, turns his arm over to expose his wrist. “So’s yours.” Her forehead creases as her thumb drags over the smooth skin. “I’m not sure whether I should be impressed that your plan wasn’t as poorly thought-out as I’d imagined or annoyed that I wasted my time saving your life unnecessarily.”

“Impressed, definitely.”

She rolls her eyes, but finds the gesture more fond than it once would have been. In fact it’s almost entirely fond. It’s so rare she gets to be reminded of her original life, her real life.

“So you’re back with SHIELD,” he says, eyeing the eagle embroidered above her doctor’s badge.

“So are you.”

“Uh uh.” He leans over—not at all something a man with a gaping chest wound should do; honestly, how does he keep under the radar—to grab his jacket from beneath the bed. When he holds it up, she can see instead of the traditional SHIELD eagle, he has SWORD’s logo.

“Oh yes,” she says, mock-solemn. “SHIELD’s extraplanetary defense division. Completely different.”

“The agency split after Director Johnson’s death, everyone knows that.”

She does know that. She didn’t learn about the event until she was going through SHIELD Academy for the second time, but when she read it in her history text the sudden swell of grief knocked the wind right out of her.

Ward’s hand tightens around hers, sending a welcome wave of warmth through her. It takes the edge off old hurts. “Why don’t you tell me what brought you back over dinner?”

She’s so blindsided by the question she can’t speak for several seconds and it’s only a nurse bumping into her that snaps her out of it. “Are you asking me out?”

He shrugs noncommittally. Grant Ward asking her on a date. She has the sudden image of many of her friends spinning in their graves all at once, causing the SHIELD cemetery grounds to shake ominously. It’s a struggle to keep from laughing.

“Is that a yes?” he asks while she smothers her giggles in her palm.

“We’re in the middle of an interdimensional _war_ ,” she reminds him. This isn’t exactly the time.

“So after the war then?”

She rolls her eyes again and leaves him and his ridiculousness in favor of more deserving patients.

 

He finds her the same hour the peace treaty is signed eight months later. She really can’t say no after that.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“This is ridiculous!” Jemma yells over the roar of the wind. Her fingers are curled so tightly around the sharp metal of the bulkhead that she fears they might come off. She knows from rather unfortunate experience that they can regrow organs, but limbs? She’d rather not test it.

The plane lurches and a moment later Grant is climbing out of the cockpit. He has to drag himself along to reach her. They are most definitely angled _down_.

“It’s a solid plan!” For all he’s yelling, his tone is conversational. “We go down in the mountains, it’ll take them weeks to find all the wreckage! They’ll assume animals dragged our bodies off.”

And they’ll have those weeks to establish new identities elsewhere, yes, she knows. It’s a perfectly sound plan. That isn’t what she was referring to.

He steps towards the door and towards her. She releases the bulkhead in favor of gripping the straps of his parachute. “I meant that we’re jumping out of a plane!”

His immediate smile tells her that he knew exactly what he was doing when he talked her into this less than an hour ago. He pulls her close to him, his arm wrapping around her waist beneath her own parachute. “I was feeling nostalgic!”

Ridiculous. He is absolutely ridiculous.

“I love you,” she says.

His smile widens. “I love you. Forever.” He pulls them out into open air.

 


End file.
